COA Solutions is exhibiting its full range of human resource (HR), payroll, time and attendance and HR analytics systems on stand H122 at the HR Software Show (18 - 19 June at Olympia Conference Centre, London).

COA Solutions’ recent acquisition of ASR Computers Ltd. (exhibiting on stand H180) has made the company a leading player in the UK human capital management (HCM) software space and can now boast more than a 5% share of this market.

“Tell me again, what is it that you actually do for a living?” Asked my Dad for the umpteenth time. For an 80 year old who left school at 14 and worked until he was 75 with racehorses, he found it difficult to get to grips with how someone like me spends his day and why any sane person would pay me to do it. At the end of the conversation, he remarked, exasperated, “that doesn’t sound like work, it sounds like pinching money”.

We’re very excited at the prospect of receiving an International Green Hero award on Monday 2nd June at the Tower of London.

We would like to extend our warm congratulations to TSL Education Ltd for a fantastic double win at the PPA’s Magazines 2008 awards for editorial and publishing excellence ceremony last night, where they won both Credit Team of the Year and Business Media Brand of the Year 2008 for the Times Educational Supplement.

There’s more pressure than ever for businesses to reduce their carbon footprint. Whether climate change is at the top of organisations’ agendas or not, measures to reduce CO2 emissions can significantly cut costs and improve staff, partner and customer relations, making business as well as environmental sense.

Being a consultant is like being a eunuch in a harem.

You get to see all the action but don’t have the wherewithal to get involved. Sometimes you wistfully think about what you would do if you were running the organisation. What if the day-dream came true? Well it turns out that you have less and less time to make a difference and this day-dream may quickly turn into a nightmare.

According to Mark Gottfredson, Steve Schubert and Hernan Saenz in their February 2008 Harvard Business Review article ‘The New Leaders Guide to Diagnosing The Business’ they pointed out that 1 in 5 of the CEOs who left their jobs in 2006 had only been in position for 8 months. This is hardly enough time to get your new office furniture, the corner room redecorated and your Blackberry fully functional.

Business Intelligence is a misnomer.

A lot of implementations that I see, and the discussions that I have with practitioners who have implemented them, seem to offer little to the business and display only a passing acquaintance with anything that could remotely be termed as intelligence.

Processing centres – where is the optimum?

 ’Shared Services’ continues to be held up as a route to radical cost reduction in the back office, freeing up funds that can be passed to the front line where it is needed more.

 Currently, however, virtually all councils are self-sufficient in processing, with around 400 centres for Corporate Services alone.  With the inevitable move to sharing services across Local Government (and possibly across other sectors), there is a question as to how many centres we might end up with.

 The scope to reduce the number of processing centres in Local Government is considerable, with a potential reduction from some 400 centres currently to less than half that in perhaps five years time.  There is also the possibility of a second wave of consolidation, depending on economic, political and technical change, with the final number possibly between 50 and 100.

 Whatever the eventual number, it seems that more organisations are going to have to work together in future if the full scale of savings are to be achieved.